I cried, whatever the circumstances, I have to admit that Lilian used to rush to console me. So while Mother stood at the door face to face with Mrs O’Brien, Lilian’s solidarity made me feel all the more guilty as she whispered, ‘Don’t cry … Don’t cry … That old witch can’t hurt Mother!’
I sobbed louder, staining my sister’s red sweater with tears and needing the toilet so badly that I was ready to pee myself.
‘Hush up, Irene!’ my mother yelled over her shoulder. Her being much wider than Mrs O’Brien, all that I could see of Mack’s wife in the doorway was the feather in her hat as her voice spat out an ultimatum that threw a pall over our room. ‘Out!’ shouted Mrs O’Brien, ‘I want you out of here before Thanksgiving.’
From the way that Mother stood with her shoulders drooping, her large arms folded in front of her and her flat feet planted too firmly on the floorboards, it was obvious that she was too weary to face an assault. There was a litany of reasons why she might have looked so beaten. Perhaps the Herzfeld girls had been bickering with each other all day or Mr Herzfeld had complained again about Mother’s cooking.
Miss Hortense said her rosary before night fell, and nothing could disturb her religious meditations. Not even the sound of Mrs O’Brien yelling, ‘Not only did Irene collect those chops from the butcher, but she delivered them to that snotty little hussy down the hall!’
A surge went through me as I was restored from darkness to light, realizing that Mrs O’Brien had only come to complain about my trip to the butcher for Mack.
Lilian held me tighter and I found enough confidence to explain that when Miss Hortense had sent me to Mack’s to buy crackers earlier, he’d sent me over to Enright’s Butcher’s for her gift.
I was too terrified of my mother’s reaction to mention that I’d gone in the rain and I was also afraid that Mrs O’Brien might guess that the free caramel Mack had given me wasn’t the first I’d swallowed.
When I’d set off, the distance had been less worrying than the big street I had to cross and the drunks that I expected to encounter on the way. But what made me certain that I could survive the long walk was that that morning before school I’d stuck what I believed to be a lucky penny in my shoe. My mind focused upon it as I made my way to the butcher’s, hopping and skipping to quell my fear as I was pelted by rain.
I can still remember the feel of the penny against the ball of my right foot as I skipped along. It must have been about four in the afternoon. There were no children out and clouds filled the sky. While I thought about the penny, the story of a chick named Henny Penny snuck into my mind. Having heard the story on the radio and seen an illustration of Henny Penny in a storybook at school, I suddenly felt that I was that yellow chick who had run around the farmyard to alert the animals that the sky was falling as a black cloud pursued him. A line from the story repeated in my head: ‘The sky is falling … the sky is falling …’
When I rounded a corner and spotted Enright’s, I saw it as shelter and ran in, more to seek safety than to do that errand for Mack.
Drenched and panting, I clutched his note so tightly that my fingers ached.
I’m not one for gasping. Hell, I didn’t gasp when I heard that I was up for that Oscar … nor when the doctor confirmed that there was something wrong with my little Nadine. But I definitely gasped that afternoon in Enright’s … Sucking my breath in hard at the sight of Mrs O’Brien standing there in a raincoat waiting to be served. Two women were ahead of her who both turned to look down at me when she snapped, ‘Mercy, Irene! Trust your mother to send you out in this storm.’
It was Mrs O’Brien’s sugary voice, reserved for Mack’s Irish customers. I wouldn’t have believed that she was addressing me had I not heard my name.
She’d called me I-rene with the stress on the ‘I’, but I-reen is correct.
And without meaning to, I actually looked into her eyes.
They were blue. A clear aquamarine. They sparked anger that went way, way back. Somewhere deep.
Mack’s wife. Nola O’Brien. More important to him than I was.
She spoke so loudly that the butcher and his boy and the two female customers heard her. ‘Your mother has owed me fifty cents since the first of the month. I knew she was lying when she claimed she didn’t have it, and it’d better not be my money she’s wasting on meat.’
Her husband had on several occasions fingered me in his dank storeroom, but I had yet to figure out that I had good reason to be fighting mad at her for that. All I knew was that Mrs O’Brien was calling Mother a liar, and insulting somebody’s mother in those days was a battle cry.
Scared to raise my head, with my eyes glued to Mrs O’Brien’s galoshes and my heart pounding, I found the gumption to say, ‘Leave my Mother alone!’ Coward that I was, I probably only said it above a whisper, but somebody heard, an old craggy woman in a headscarf who whacked me on the head with the handle of her umbrella saying, ‘No-account little niggers make you forget yourself.’ When my arms flew to protect my head, I dropped Mack’s note and, wet and wounded, I howled like a baby.
To be honest, I really thought I had no right to be in Enright’s, because he was a white butcher and his customers were white.
Mrs O’Brien leered over me like she’d been smelling my scent on her husband’s fingertips. As I bent to pick up Mack’s note which had fallen by her foot, she kicked my hand away and reached down herself.
Her eyes flashed like a cat ready to take on a dog, and I was too terrified to swallow.
When she snorted, ‘Kidneys!’ only a crack of lightning could have made me jump more.
Before I could run Mrs O’Brien grabbed me, thrusting me violently towards the meat chopping block. Then she snapped, ‘Mr Enright, give this child a couple pork chops. With the kidneys, and don’t give her your best.’ My pulse was pounding in my ears and I was gulping big sobs.
I blubbered half the way home, but the rain had stopped and when I spotted a rainbow, I forgot that I’d been hit. I’d heard about rainbows and seen them in storybooks but had never seen one for real and the sight now filled me with overwhelming glee. Of course this sudden mood switch, this inability to hold onto torment, is a sign of a weak character, a failing that Mother always said came from my father.
Any normal child would have probably delivered the chops to Miss Hortense in tears, devastated and confused, but I skipped into Mack’s, collected the soda crackers that Miss Hortense had originally sent me for and popped that caramel in my mouth before hearing the bell tinkle as I shut the door. I had completely forgotten that I’d seen his wife.
Two hours later, when Mrs O’Brien was shouting at our door, Mother blocking my view, I couldn’t see the way Mrs O’Brien brandished Mack’s note.
For such a skimpy piece of paper with so little on it, it carried an uncommon weight and was to be brandished again by Mack’s lawyer. The newspaper report claimed that Mrs O’Brien mistook the note as evidence that Mack was involved in an illicit, sordid relationship with a coloured maid from Los Angeles named Hortense Alvarez.
Coloured being the operative word.
But the newspapers always mash up the facts and Mexicans do have some colour.
